Day 39 – Magnetic Island to Airlie Beach
Travel Location: Airlie-Beach,Australia
The morning started with a heavy tropical thunderstorm at 6 am. Our first thought was about the diving and the second one on our small, topless car. WE were listening to the rain and thunder and about a half hour later the phone rang. The dive was cancelled because of the storm. This of course changed our plan and we decided to leave Magnetic Island early and drive down the coast towards Mackay. The target for today was to reach the Whitsunday Islands which are about 100km north of Mackay and about 5 hours drive from our place.
We reached Proserpine about 4 pm. Proserpine is the closest city on the North-South Highway to the Whitsunday coast and has an official visitor information centre. The Whitsunday’s are a group of Islands just off the coast and are famous for sailing. That is of course what we tried to book last minute. The boats are normally booked out weeks in advance and we were just lucky enough that one of the smaller boats got a cancellation that day. We got a good offer for a 4 day/3 nights cruise on an old sailing boat that only has 7 passengers and 3 crew. That is more to our style of travelling than the big boats that take 30 or more people.
The boat is not to leave until the next day and we made our way to XXXX which is just at the coast. I got myself some tablets against seasickness as well as some eardrops for my infection I must have picked up during diving or swimming.
